Emerson Direct, Inc. and Direct Mail

Emerson Direct, Inc... Direct mail can be a high profit, low cost advertising medium. Make your direct mail campaign a hit with these comprehensive tips and tricks.

Emerson Direct has been in the direct response marketing business a long time as direct response marketing professionals who are adept at all of the marketing nuances that exist in today's direct response world, Emerson Direct knows how important the delivery of the response is, directly between the client and the customer. Let's say you identify a new market, one that you think is going to be very receptive to your product or service. The cost of advertising to this market may be prohibitive: The best publications are frightfully expensive, and your ads couldn't appear for a few months.

Because of this, we at Emerson Direct know that direct mail marketing provides you with a way to conduct a test of a target market somewhat quickly, with not a huge outlay of cash, and with measureable results. In other words, you'll know quickly what the results are.

Interestingly enough most direct response marketers 's most common use of their developed in house marketing database is to generate a targeted list for a clients direct-mail campaign. Of course, direct mail also works with purchased lists, but generally those lists have been used prior to it's purchase, so the results will be considerably less than anticipated. Emerson Direct mail provides our clients with the ability to target defined customers with highly focused offers.

At Emerson Direct, For smaller companies, using direct mail has a number of attractive advantages: We can target your recipients very precisely. With direct mail, we can start out with a decent-size mailing to study the response and make sure you can handle it in regards to getting back to your prospects in a timely manner. Costs can be kept in check. Or, more precisely, we can create a campaign to any and all budgets types.

With Emerson Direct mail, it can happen fast. And usually does. With a good "first"campaign to a known target audience, we can acquire a mailing list, develop your mailing materials (including direct-mail letter, flier, reply card, etc), launch your mailing and start to receive results in just a few months. With direct response marketing, it's typically faster than your run of the mill advertising campaign-and certainly works better than sitting around waiting for the phone to ring.

We typcially test different mail pieces for our clients, which are called "offers", this is our way of selecting which one will work best. By creating a different offer to randomly different portions of our clients mailing list, we can see which offer pulls best. We then go with our best performer until we find a better one. At Emerson Direct we test, test, test. As we try different offers and different letters, we generally find that one does better than another. At this point we use the better one, than try to beat that in our next mailing. Eventually, we should get better and better response rates.

We can and generally mail to the same list again with a slightly different mailing and can still get decent results. At Emerson Direct our philosophy is that we will use a direct mail list until they generally are pulling nothing. The great thing about direct response marketing is that you can never run out of prospects. We are constantly using our imagination to find new niche direct-mail markets for our clients products. Whether it's in the retail industry or B to B or B to C, we are constantly exploring and suggesting possible target markets worth testing.

Specifically with consumer products, we can often sell them right through the mail, (It's essentially how Emerson Direct got started in the direct response marketing business over 15 years ago).. . . or at least get customers and prospects to drop on in. With B to B products, we generally create a two pronged approach. First, we ellicit a response from our mail piece with an indication or interest in the form of a request for catalog, literature, report or sample for example. We like to call this the lead-generation phase. Once we mail off the requested material, we then follow up with additional material or a phone call/fax/e-mail which then transforms that lead, either cold, warm, or hot, into a bonafide prospect.

The importance of building a direct mail list with Emerson direct

One of the most important aspects of direct mail is the mailing list that we use. We tell all of our clients that that list, is your client or customer list. Your existing customers are your hottest prospects!. It all begins with and began with your first customers. This is an Emerson direct trusim. There may be a lot of things you don't know in your industry, but you know this customer purchased your product once before and chances are, unless you're terrible at customer service, will buy again.

Of the many questions that we ask of all our Emerson Direct clients, here are some of them: Where do your customers live? First lets sort by zip code. Are there certain zip codes where the majority of your customers exist? What are the demographics of your customers and that particular area? What Emerson Direct wants to know, is what do you know about your customer.The more you know, the more thorough of an understanding of the profile of your geographic market we can get, in order to help you..

As Emerson Direct learns more about your customers, we then can find out more about your product and why they bought. If these people bought your product, then people like them will be likely to buy your product. At least they'll be more likely to buy your product than the public as a whole. In direct response we need to target the niche and the niche within that niche. The more we understand you and your product, the better we can market that product to your customers peers.

Emerson Direct Mail steps

We help our clients develop a mailing list. It's there, it's in house, but the raw data just needs to be developed. We put a description of the targets on this list in writing, so we know exactly to whom we're mailing.

We create a compelling mail piece. We don't just mail out a brochure to a list. It gets too expensive, and the brochures weren't designed for it. Plus it will get zero bang for the buck.We create a direct-mail piece with a strong offer that will spur the customer to action. All direct mail leads to a"call to action": Then we decide or ask our clients, what do you want the customer to do next? What do you want them to do, once they have received the mail piece? Mail something back? Call an 800 number? Fill out an order form online?

We try to never be too pushy in our direct response mail. We do however try to be clever, cute, whimsical, but only in the sense that we can spur them to action.Because our goal is to get action. We don't want a direct-mail piece to inform. That's what a brochure is for. We want action! Roughly 39% percent of a mail piece's impact comes from sending it to the right list and another 39-40% of the impact comes from the value of the offer. So that means that the power of the words within the mail piece need to be effective. Great graphics are just that, great and nothing more than 20% of the value of the pieece as it translates to the customers call to action.

Whatever way we ask recipients to respond, we make we tage the mailing We usually do this by assigning each mailing a batch number, By doing this it provides us a simple device for revealing just who has responded to which mailing and to which offer. It makes individual responses much more valuable, since you can easily tabulate the different codes to see what's working the best for you. Its Emerson Directs way of tracking our direct response mailing campaigns effectiveness.

Test test and test. Even a modest campaign of the few thousand pieces can run up a budget with mailing and duplication costs. So we always test mail to a portion of our clients mailing list and check the results. No matter how good the list, no one can predict the response rate you'll get; there are just too many things that can affect the response.

What constitutes a test? It varies, but we test anywhere from 10-15% percent of a list and no less than 300 pieces. This will give you enough of a spread across the multitude of variables to make the results worth something. Before we test, we decide what response rate will support us moving forward with a planned major mailing. This all depends on our clients budget of course. Our experience suggests that if the rate is less than 2 percent, than we need to check some things out. Either the list is wrong, or theoffer is too weak. If we get a response rate above 7 percent for a mass mailing, then we have, in baseball terms, have hit no less than a triple.

As we run the campaign, we keep your mailing pace in line with our ability and the clients to handle the potential responses. The test mailing gives us some sense of the rate of customer response. We then use that as a gauge for how many pieces we should mail in a given week. We then mail only those pieces that our clients can support with their existing sales and support staff.

Emerson Direct suggests that you make sure you can handle the fulfillment end of the direct-mail campaign, and with this comes considerable planning. When asking respondents to request additional information, we make sure that you know what you are going to send them. We tell you how soon you are going to send the information out. We then guide you on what else you should do with the responses. We then show our clients how they can maximum the use of the names we've spent so much time to acquire.

When mailing out product or samples, we want you to think about distribution methods. Many mail order campaigns depend on fulfillment houses, professional organizations that handle the logistics of sending out materials to large quantities of customers.

Lastly after the dust has settled, we sit down with our customers and we analyze the results of the campaign. At Emerson Direct, this to us is perhaps the most important, and underrated, aspect of a direct response mail campaign. Did the final results match what we expected from the test? Did we target the right group? Who responded better than expected? Who can we focus on in future mailings? This is just a sampling of the many direct response type questions we would ask after the first of hopefully many direct mailings. We want our clients to start to understand our thinking so as to better develop their future customers and prospects.

Every direct-mail campaign that Emerson Direct runs is with the client objective that it contribute not just to our clients sales figures but that it also enhances and builds our clients customer database. In very concrete and measurable terms, it represents where you as our client will be going as we head together into the 21st century.

For a free consultation on your direct mail business needs and what Emerson Direct can do for your business, you can go to our Emerson Direct Contact page or call us at 239-254-0175. Click here, To find out more about why direct response marketing is important and why it should include Emerson Direct.